Analysis of Optimization Techniques to Improve User Response Time of Web Applications and Their Implementation for MOODLE

TL;DR

This paper evaluates seven optimization techniques across hardware, back-end, and front-end categories to reduce user response time in Moodle, demonstrating the most significant improvement with hardware upgrades using SSDs.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of multiple optimization strategies for Moodle, highlighting the effectiveness of hardware upgrades with SSDs in response time reduction.

Findings

Hardware optimization with SSDs achieved maximum response time reduction.

Performance improvements vary across different optimization techniques.

Tabular comparison of techniques' effectiveness is provided.

Abstract

Analysis of seven optimization techniques grouped under three categories (hardware, back-end, and front-end) is done to study the reduction in average user response time for Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment (Moodle), a Learning Management System which is scripted in PHP5, runs on Apache web server and utilizes MySQL database software. Before the implementation of these techniques, performance analysis of Moodle is performed for varying number of concurrent users. The results obtained for each optimization technique are then reported in a tabular format. The maximum reduction in end user response time was achieved for hardware optimization which requires Moodle server and database to be installed on solid state disk.